A group of veterans and their allies have entered their third week of a “Fast for Gaza” outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The group is calling for an end to arms sales to Israel and of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. We hear from multiple hunger strikers on their decisions to join the planned 40-day action and why they are pressuring the U.N. in particular. “We wake up each morning, and we don’t worry about whether or not our children have been buried under rubble overnight. We’re not drinking poisoned water. We’re not surrounded by rubble. We’re not dealing with the horrible traumas that people in Palestine and Gaza are dealing with,” says peace activist Kathy Kelly, who started her hunger strike two weeks ago. “What would make us stop? Well, certainly, if there were a permanent, unconditional, immediate ceasefire.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”

“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.

On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.

Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:

• Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”

• Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.

• Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”

• Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.

• Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

• Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.

• Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”

Notable new advisory board members:

• Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.  

• Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.

• Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

• Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.

• Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”

• Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

The fasters are demanding:

1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority, and

2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.

Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 co-sponsoring organizations.

Remarkably, over 600 people have registered to join the fast. Friends of Sabeel, NA, is maintaining the list of fasters.

Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters and many others are asking. The U.S. government is shamelessly complicit in Israel’s genocide, and to a lesser extent, the same is true for the European governments.  The silence and inaction of most Middle Eastern countries is resounding. Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the only countries to come to Palestine’s aid, have been bombed by Israel and the U.S., with the threat of more to come. Syria, another country that stood with Palestine, has been “regime changed” and handed over to former al-Qaeda/ISIS extremists.

On the positive side, some governments are making their voices heard. South Africa and Nicaragua have taken Israel and Germany, respectively, to the International Court of Justice – Israel for its genocide, and Germany for providing weapons to Israel.  And millions of regular people around the globe have protested loudly and continue to do so.

Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has provided crucial leadership, pushing back against the phony charges of “anti-semitism” that are thrown at the student protesters whose courageous resistance has spoken for so many.  University administrators have been all too quick to crack down on the students, violating their right to freedom of speech, but even these universities have come under attack from the repressive, anti-democratic Trump administration.

Peace-loving people are frustrated and angry. Some are worried they will be detained or deported. And many of us are suffering from Moral Injury, concerned about our own complicity. How are we supposed to act as we watch U.S. bombs obliterate Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities?  What are we supposed to do when we see Palestinian children being starved to death, systematically and live-streamed?

Because our movement is nonviolent, we do not want to follow the example of the young man who shot and killed two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. However, we understand his frustration and the driving force behind his forceful action. We take courage from the supreme sacrifice of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, asking, “What would you do?”

Student protesters at several universities around the country have initiated “hunger strikes,” a protest tactic often considered a last resort. Now they have been joined by military veterans.

“Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides,” said Mike Ferner, former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and one of the fasters.  “Too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Vietnam,” said the former Navy corpsman. “This madness will only stop when enough Americans demand it stops.”

Rev. Addie Domske, National Field Organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), said, “This month I celebrated my third Mother’s Day with a renewed commitment to parent my kid toward a free Palestine. As a mother, I am responsible for feeding my child. I also believe, as a mother, I must be responsive when other children are starving.

Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, also in NY for the fast, said, “Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, at age 81, recently fasted for forty days, saying ‘As the children of Gaza are hungry and injured with bombs by official Israeli policy, I have decided that I, too, must go hungry with them, as I in good conscience can do no other.’ Now, Israel intensifies its efforts to eradicate Gaza through bombing, forcible displacement, and siege. We must follow Mairead’s lead, hungering acutely for an end to all weapon shipments to Israel. We must ask, ‘who are the criminals?’ as war crimes multiply and political leaders fail to stop them.”

Another faster is Joy Metzler: 23, Cocoa, FL., a 2023 graduate of the Air Force Academy who became a Conscientious Objector and left the Air Force, citing US aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine. Joy is now a member of Veterans For Peace and a co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire.

“I am watching as our government unconditionally supports the very violations of international law that the Air Force trained me to recognize,” said Joy Metzler. “I was trained to uphold the values of justice, and that is why I am speaking out and condemning our government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

I spoke with VFP leader Mike Ferner on Day 7 of his Fast. The NYPD had just told him and the other fasters that they could no longer sit down in front of the US Mission to the UN on the little stools they had brought. But Mike Ferner was not complaining. He said:

“We go home every night to a safe bed, and we can drink clean water. We are not watching our children starve to death before us. Our sacrifice is a small one. We are taking a stand for humanity, and we encourage others to do what they can.  Demand full humanitarian relief in Gaza under UN authority, and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. This is how we can stop the genocide.”

More information about how you can participate or support the fasters is available at
Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza.

To arrange interviews with the fasters, contact Mike Ferner at 314-940-2316.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerry Condon.

Having worked in record stores for 10 years and just always being somehow in love with music, I have very varied taste, and my first instrument was drums. There’s such a journey for me as a genuine music fan. It’s interesting when you could almost make anything because you’re aware of what exists out there. But then, what I’m creating is what only I could create, and that bounces between genres, but it’s just my authentic voice that I do and don’t have control over. If I’d have made music when I was, say, 19 or 20—I didn’t write my first track until I was 25—I would’ve possibly been way more influenced by what other people were doing, what was cool in that moment.

It’s been a genuine slow-burn journey of mine to fall in love with electronic music and analog synths a bit later in my life. Combining that with all of those melodic sensibilities, my Welsh heritage, the undertones of spirituality and hopefulness, that’s always there for me. Somehow, an amalgamation of all those things is what comes out. It’s as interesting to me as anyone else what ends up on a record.

You were saying there are ways that you can’t control what your voice is. I’m curious what some of those ways are.

It’s almost not up to me. I don’t come into the studio with any reinforced musical ideas. I have a lot of notepads, and I gather, and I try to catch the feelings, colors, tones, and energy of what’s in the air at the moment, and I think most artists are like that. And then, I turn up on the day, and what comes out comes out, what’s expressed is expressed, and I genuinely never know what that is, and it’s so cliche, but it’s true. It’s cliche for a reason. There’s something other that’s driving you. There’s something that feels like it needs to be created.

Being true to yourself is important because only through your unique lens of experience and being in this body, can you put your art out into the ether. But then you have collaboration, which makes it even more interesting.

Speaking of collaboration: When you bring in co-writers or co-producers, which you don’t always do, why do you make that decision? What does it do for you?

On your first couple of records, you’re trying to figure out who you are, and it’s important that it’s almost as pure as it can be, as close to your own vision as possible. But the more you create, the more you potentially have more confidence and understanding of who you are as an artist. I think anyone, by their third or fourth record, is curious where their voice meets with another.

With everything that happened with the pandemic, I wanted to collaborate in ways I haven’t before. I wanted to be in rooms full of more people than I’ve performed in before, and I was very lucky to do that with Depeche Mode, Underworld, and the Chemical Brothers last year. I couldn’t not take that in and create something from that.

I’m very blessed to have worked with Tom Rowlands [of The Chemical Brothers] and Bicep, for example, on this record, and it was such a joy but also a task: How can I make sure that I’m collaborating, but genuinely, it’s my vision and my collaborators are facilitating me on my journey?

How did you choose these collaborators specifically? I’m also curious about George Daniel’s musical involvement since he co-runs the label you’re signed to [dh2, Dirty Hit’s new imprint for electronic music].

I’ll start with Tom Rowlands. Initially, he’d sent me some tracks for The Chems’ last record. The initial idea was that he had loads of demos floating around and I would write vocals, but also, there was room to produce and write. He’s so open and generous considering he’s been doing this for a long time and has his own sound and ideas, but what he’d sent me, there was one track I couldn’t resonate with in a way that felt truthful to me.

That’s another test. Never did I think as 15-year-old Kelly that The Chemical Brothers would send me a track and I’d be like, “I don’t know if this is for me” and send it back and be like, “Maybe this is for someone else.” He was so patient, kind, and generous and said, “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more. Let me send you two more.”

I ended up writing, producing, and performing on the one that was more ballad-like, which I love because I don’t think it’s what people would expect from me when I talk about myself and The Chemical Brothers collaborating, but it was much more interesting and organic. I sent him vocals that I recorded in my bedroom–it was demo vocals, that’s all it was ever going to be—just to see how it flowed. He was like, “Wow. This is unreal. This song is yours.”

I’m hearing you talk about collaboration as though it’s new for you, but when I think of your origins, I think of you working with Daniel Avery. Can you talk about how collaboration maybe feels different to you now instead?

If I’m really honest, it’s more collaboration in the true sense when you are allowing people to express ideas without trying to control them too much. I think I was a control freak [early on in my career]. I was so determined to make sure this was my thing, my vision, and my energy and put my stamp into the world. There’s lots at play there like, being a woman in the music industry, no one ever really believes you’re the authentic author of your creations, especially if there’s a man involved along the way, which they often are.

There was this fire and determination that maybe closed me off a bit, but I think that was required in that particular moment, whereas now, I’m way more relaxed. I know who I am, I know what I do, I know what my strengths are, but I know things I’m less good at and what I want to learn, and I want to be in other people’s worlds and find out where those colors and energies meet and where they don’t. Coming together, whether it’s sonically or together in person and sonically, is the thing I’m interested in most at the moment.

You’ve done remixes for some of my favorite artists. What does putting a new spin on other folks’ music teach you about your own creative process?

One of my big strengths as a producer is being able to zoom in and zoom out. I’m obsessed with detail, but I’m also able to zoom out and see this as the whole thing: What’s the story? It’s like storytelling. Maybe that’s the Welsh heritage thing. I only say yes to things I feel I can do something with, but it’s just putting a twist on the story, or telling my version of that story.

Obviously, how amazing if you have parts from Björk or whoever it is—it’s just an absolute pleasure. What you gather from working with people you haven’t worked with before is the freedom to create in a way that perhaps you don’t think you’re allowed within your own box that you put yourself in sometimes. I was listening [to my Glass Animals remix recently]. I was like, “I really let myself loose.” That’s the beauty of it.

I’m curious to hear more about what you said about not putting yourself into a box anymore.

When I worked in record stores, people put—where do you put Arthur Russell, for example? Folk, electronic? He’s just Arthur Russell as I am just Kelly Lee Owens. I spoke to Jon Hopkins about this when I did LP.8, and he said to me, “Please tell me you’re going to put this under your name even though this won’t be what people are expecting of you.” I was nervous about doing it, but I thought, “This is also part of who I am, this deeper, dark, feminine, very spiritual but still analog energy.” Doing that album also broke me out of thinking, “I have to create a very specific type of music.”

It’s the same for Dreamstate. There might be fans who are alienated, who’ve been there from the beginning, who think, “This is too pop, this is too whatever.” This is me and I’m unapologetic about it. I grew up listening to pop music, but it’s not just that. This is what I want to make now, and I’m only ever going to be true to myself.

You’re the first person to release music on dh2. Why did you feel it was time for a new group of record label collaborators?

Once again, it’s me pushing against those boundaries of either boxes I [or other people] put myself in. I have always thought laterally about things, and my previous management and I parted ways very amicably. It was just time—you outgrow relationships, and both [my previous label] Smalltown Supersound and my previous management are supportive of what I’m doing now.

You have to reassess, decide what you’re going after, and be bold. I’ve always been bold, and I’m not going to stop now. It intrigued me to be given a potential opportunity to work with an amazing label like Dirty Hit. But the thing that made the most amount of sense for me was the fact that it was a new electronic subsidiary.

I feel very blessed that it worked out, and it was cosmic timing. I work with management [that’s involved] with Charli [XCX, Daniel’s fiancé]—there’s a management company that she’s involved with, and she’s been part of a little bit of the creative process, and it’s such a unique experience to have artists involved in both management and labels. That was too good of an offer to refuse. I was like, “I don’t know if this has ever been done before in this way.”

A lot of questions I ask in interviews are about the creative process, but I’m also curious about artists’ involvement in the management process because that does matter. Yes, creativity comes first, but you do have to get the music out there.

Absolutely. I think it’s as important, I’ve said this previously—you can be the best musician ever, but if you don’t have the right people to help you get it out there, no one’s going to hear it.

I think [dh2] is a step up, in terms of they’re incredible people to work with, super professional, but also feel like family. It’s quite a unique thing to have where it’s business, but there’s also immense care there as well. I enjoy working with these people every single day, and I think that’s half of it. You have to enjoy who you work with, and there’s a symbiosis. I feel like I’ve found a home to grow within.

I was reading your recent interview with The Face, and you said that you’re in work mode a lot, and your way of getting away from it is going on a walk in a green space with music on. How did you figure out that this was your way to take a break from your creative work?

It’s interesting when you say a break from creative work, because the irony is that giving yourself the time and the space to reconnect with nature or move your body, it only helps inform that and give back to that, which is this added bonus. It was out of absolute necessity for me, living in a city, to figure out how to break cycles of stress or work when it becomes negative, when it’s just too much.

When you’ve crossed the line, your body is the last thing to tell you. Giving, in some way, to your body is always the best place to start. I know it sounds so obvious to say being in nature, but…this is nothing new. Our lives are packed to the brim with things trying to stimulate our minds when, really, a lot of the time, they’re wearing us down. It’s about being conscious of that and giving to yourself…to sustain the thing you love doing.

What would you tell somebody looking to find their own way to avoid burnout?

I don’t think there’s one formula. It depends what you enjoy, but moving your body in some way is good. I started resistance training recently, but when I grew up, I used to do Taekwondo. I’m a black belt in Taekwondo. I trained with a girl who now has a gold medal for the U.K. Somehow, I’ve always found something where I can release, be present, and move. I referenced that on LP.8 when it’s like, “Move the body.” Again, very ancient understanding and knowledge of dancing. It’s almost like dancing to save your life, dancing to feel.

I remember going to Berghain, and I played in the Cantina and what I loved was, you could be alone and together with people, and sometimes, that’s the best way. You can go there on your own, but the aim is to be in the moment. To move your body with sound is another great way of doing it.

One very practical, maybe boring thing is, I have this incredible coffee shop up the road from me. I have a ritual of walking there but leaving my phone at home. Anti-technology, in moments, is absolutely the key to groundedness and reminding yourself of all the beautiful things that are at your fingertips other than a phone or laptop.

I was also reading your recent interview with Vice, and you said, “I let things happen to me truly trusting that everything will work out.” How have you applied that mantra to your creative process?

There are certain situations in life you go through that are really tough, and you’re like that Murakami thing when, if you’re going to go down, go down to the deepest part of the well, and there’s only one way up from there. That’s why [Dreamstate has song titles like] “Rise” and “Higher.” I had to put my faith in the universe in a way that I had never. I had to embody faith, just completely trusting that it would be okay, it would work out, I’m worthy of all these good things that are going to come, and oh my god, I had the best year of my life.

I would highly recommend it. I don’t think I’d ever done that before. I’ve always been, even while being spiritual, a bit skeptical in moments or too analytical, and instead, I just let myself be. I’ve never been more present in my life than I was last year. The only other time I’ve really felt like that is when I create music, and it relates in that sense. We are always trying to find that moment, when you’re creating something, where it’s all flowing and working, and I feel like as artists, you’re always trying, chasing after those moments. But for the first time in my life, I felt that every day, in my day-to-day life.

That was everything I wanted to ask you today, but at the end of these conversations, I like to say that if you have anything more you want to say about the creative process, please go ahead.

Don’t be intimidated by it. If you are intimidated, especially with technology, find someone who’s good at the technology bit. It doesn’t make you any less of an artist or a producer.

There’s a quote about being bold, and it’s like, “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Begin it now. Don’t wait. The time will pass anyway.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I just spiraled deeply. The more I worked with the instrument, the more I realized, even though I can make it do all these inhuman things, it sounds best when I’m just playing and merging things seamlessly. I feel like I’ve spent almost 10,000 hours on this instrument alone, just scaling the dynamics and listening. It’s made me a really sensitive and focused composer. It’s hard with this piano because you have so much control. I had to almost forcibly tell myself when I was done. It’s like a piece of clay that I could just keep sculpting and improving forever. But there comes a point when only you are noticing the improvements. So you have to find that satisfaction. I was like, “It’s time to just trust my intuition and let it go.”

Once you worked past the novelty of the instrument, what did you notice about the music you were making? Despite the complex mechanics behind it, it feels very organic and immediate.

During the initial sessions, I recorded each part separately so I could have more control over everything. Sometimes when you reach that level of perfection, it starts to not sound human anymore. It was just missing that heart. I felt like a megalomaniac. I was like, “Oh, I can have every part spatialized perfectly and you’re going to hear every single note I wrote. Everything will have its perfect place and it will be designed perfectly.” And it did have that, but I felt like it was missing the messiness of a human performance—or some kind of cohesion. That was one way of working with the instrument, but it actually sounds best when I can blend and merge everything and it’s all resonating simultaneously. I think that is the real beauty of the instrument. Yes, the perfection is cool. But what is so unique about it is that it truly allows you to push the sonic limit of the piano. That was a big realization for me. There was the allure of perfection, and then I had to destroy it and messy it up again.

In addition to your solo music, you have a rich collaborative history. What did you learn from playing in bands?

God, I immediately thought of the dumbest thing, which now I feel like I should say. When I was in the no-wave band Cellular Chaos with Weasel Walter, he was like “Do whatever the fuck you want on stage—just remember to keep your mouth closed. Because if they’re taking photos, it’s gonna look bad!” So that’s one thing I’m conscious of. But more seriously, I think I just learned how to become more confident. I was in that band with three much older, seminal musicians from the New York downtown. There was Marc Edwards, who played with Cecil Taylor. Weasel Walter was a really iconic avant-garde jazz drummer in a million bands. And then Admiral Gray was our singer, who was like this theater girl. They had all been in a million bands and toured everywhere. They were all living that authentic New York artist life where they were just touring in a van and working a million random odd jobs. They were all so scrappy but so dedicated and passionate. When I first saw them perform, my first thought was: “I want to be in that band because those people are having more fun than I’ve ever seen people have on stage.” They would really go insane. Weasel would wear these giant gauntlets on his arm that would shred the paint off of his guitar. Their level of performance was just so theatrical, and I had to match it. In college I had been much more reserved, so I allowed myself to completely let loose. I became comfortable with commanding a stage.

Despite your penchant for collaboration, most of your solo work is created in isolation. What led you to that process?

I’m a really stubborn, controlling person when it comes to music. Also I know it’s not like this now, but when I was growing up, I remember feeling like there weren’t a lot of female producers. I remember reading an interview with Björk and she talked about this struggle as a woman producer. People thought that someone helped her with her music, like some guy was helping her record it. When I went to college in my electronic music major, there were 80 guys and two women. I felt very early on that I was gonna be underestimated or viewed as not being as skilled, especially in the studio. So I made this stubborn decision where I was like, “I don’t want anyone to help me with my music. I’m going to do everything.” I didn’t want someone else getting credit. That major had a really big impact on me. I remember feeling so othered and being like, I have to work harder for them to take me seriously because I’m already underestimated. I already feel like I’m sticking out, you know? My sophomore year I cut off my hair. I started wearing glasses. I started dressing more conservatively because I wanted to be taken more seriously. And what’s nice is that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve allowed myself to go back to looking like myself and not this minimized version. For lack of a better phrase, it has helped me take up more space.

During those periods of uncertainty, what kept you devoted to the piano?

I learned this really cheesy phrase a couple of years ago but I like it. I heard it from listening to this psychic. She would ask people what makes you feel the most like yourself. If you’re confused about your life or not sure what to do with your career, you have to ask yourself: What acts that I take part in make me feel the most like myself? And for me, that’s playing piano. I feel like I can express myself on piano better than I can express myself in words. I feel completely in control in a way I don’t feel anywhere else in my life. Musically and agility-wise, it’s something that I’m always improving at. I know with pianists we can be very compulsive and practice for hours and hours a day. But for me, my idea of perfection, it’s really just being the best version of myself and being able to communicate my creative intention in a way that feels honest and genuine.

What happens when the thing that makes you feel most like yourself becomes tethered to your livelihood? Do financial pressures affect your relationship to your craft?

My first job that I ever had was being a piano accompanist for a voice teacher in my town. I was 12 years old and I was getting paid $10 an hour. This kid in my grade, his mom was the teacher and I would go to her house for six hours every Saturday, playing piano for these kids. I just remember being like, “Holy shit, I can make money doing this? Why the fuck would I do anything else in my life?“ That moment made me realize that this is all I’m going to focus on.

So very early on, I had this conception of having music tied to my livelihood. It’s not an easy path because there’s no one way to make money as a musician. But another thing that helped me decouple music and financial incentives was the fact that these voice lessons were also basically therapy sessions for the students. This woman was like a surrogate mom to all of them. They were all kids in my grade or at my school, and I was just sitting at the piano while they would come in and sit on the couch and say things that they couldn’t tell their parents. Then they’d get up and start singing and it was like a weight was lifted. It was really empowering for me to see this. Music is an intrinsically healing thing. It’s a form of self soothing. So no matter how stressful it can be to have a career in music and to deal with all the bullshit of the industry, I think just the act of making music has always made everything else feel worth it to me. It allows me to not get in my head about being successful or making money. Because that’s not why I do it. I do it because it feels good and it makes me happy.

As your work reaches a bigger audience, how do you keep your music feeling like a natural extension of your emotional state and not like productivity?

I think I’ve realized in the past couple of years that I make the best music when I am allowing myself to really feel my feelings and have that be the focus of what I’m doing. The times when it’s hardest for me are when it’s like… Last week I had to submit a demo for a commercial. They were using one of my songs as the temp music, and they were like, “Do you want to try to write something a minute-and-a-half long? It needs to be uplifting and sentimental but not too sad.” It was so fucking hard to do! I felt like I was losing my mind.

But then to contrast that, the times when it’s easiest for me are when I can go deep into what’s honestly happening inside of me. I know that sounds weird, but if I can explain, it’ll make more sense. Last summer, I had a really, really bad breakup that totally caught me by surprise and just made me so depressed. And I was like, “I can cope with this in one of two ways. I can either, you know, sit in bed and watch TV and eat ice cream and just numb myself.” Then the deranged creative part of my brain was like, “Oh, you’re really raw right now. This is a good opportunity for you.” So I went to the piano and said to myself, “I want to feel these feelings even deeper. I need to get this out.” And I feel like I made some of my best music during those sessions. I truly feel that being emotionally in touch with yourself, and just being honest with yourself, is what will yield the best work.

You mentioned writing a song for a commercial. Are there any offers where you would draw the line with your music?

I guess I wouldn’t let our government use it. [laughs] I’m not opposed to commercials or things like that. I want to make a living. It’s funny, I haven’t had an opportunity to sell out yet. I’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to make things work off what I’ve been doing.

How did you develop your own definition of success when it comes to your music?

I’ve always known that there are a million talented pianists in the world. You could probably walk a block in New York and find a better pianist than me. When I was in college studying classical music, I heard someone in the practice room next to me playing the same Brahms sonata—but playing it better than me. It was one of those moments where I was like, “Well, I’m not gonna be the best Brahms Interpreter.” But I can be the best interpreter of my music. That’s what I strive for.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Sodomsky.

After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.

As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the campus, students asked her to help defuse an already tense situation.

She identified herself to onlooking university administrators as a Green Party Presidential candidate. Stein, along with St. Louis Aldermanic President Megan Green and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, attempted to persuade university administrators to let students stay. Police moved to block the conversation. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who attempted a discussion with university vice-chancellor Julie Hail Flory was ordered to leave the campus.

Merrill and Stein looked for a restroom and found all doors locked, but a student was able to unlock one door. Hearing yelling that the police were about to attack, they quickly went outside. They walked into the space between students and police, pleading for calm. But the police stormed in.

Merrill reported that “This was the first time I understood why so many police are on bicycles. They picked them up and used them as weapons to push people down.” When police began assailing protesters, they targeted Stein first and did not bother the two Democratic Party officials. They threw Stein on her head, threw Merrill to the ground, jumped on Call, and dozens became their victims.

Students were charged with trespassing and disruptive behavior. Those who were arrested have been prohibited from re-entering campus even if they will miss final examinations and not graduate. The administration-police reaction followed a pattern at universities across the US as if it had been scripted in Joe Biden’s office.

Being assaulted, arrested and jailed was only the beginning of Stein’s ordeal. Not being told what would happen to her, Stein sat alone in a cell for hours before being released. Exhausted, she did not make it to our house to sleep until 3:00 in the morning.

On Monday morning, April 29 Stein took a break from her mid-states tour to get checked out at University Hospital in Columbia MO. They found that, though very bruised, her rib was not broken; and she continued to Kansas City.

Bob Suberi is a Jewish member of the St. Louis Green Party who has made several solidarity visits to the West Bank. He brings back stories of the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberately provoking Palestinians in order to have an excuse for over-reacting, sometimes with a massive raid. Similarly, Washington University students committed the trivial infraction of occupying space regularly used for events such as carnivals and this became the excuse for a police invasion.

The similarities between practices in Palestine and on US campuses is unmistakable. This is true not only for intolerance of dissent and brutality. It is also the case with the way Israelis destroy sanitary facilities in Gaza, leaving people with nowhere to relieve themselves except on sidewalks. This serves both to humiliate Palestinians and create a health crisis.

The mounting opposition to Israel’s war is reflected by the wide variety of speakers at the St. Louis Green Party event: Andrew de las Alas (Asians Demanding Justice), Saish Satyal (College Democrats), Lila Steinbach (Jewish Students for Palestine), Bahar Bastani MD (Dar al-Zahra Mosque and Education Center), Shahab Mushtaq (Green Party of St. Louis), Bob Suberi (Veterans For Peace), Chibu Asonye (Green Party of Illinois), Zaki Baruti (Universal African Peoples Organization) and Omali Yeshitela (African People’s Socialist Party).

Jewish herself, Stein insists that “The students are not the villains in this struggle against Israeli violence. They are in fact the heroes, defending the right of free speech and to peacefully protest. Many already see the villains being the Washington University administration, those who conspired with them to destroy free speech, and the Biden gang whose fingerprints are all over efforts to shut down peace initiatives. Out of one side of his mouth Biden claims he is working to end the killing and maiming of Palestinians. From the other side of his mouth comes the push for billions of war dollars that are causing the genocide.”

Dr. Stein joined tens of thousands of students in campuses across the US who are demanding university divestment from Boeing and other companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel. Students presented Washington University with five demands:

University officials told the press that they felt that they had to take action because the demonstrators “had the potential to get out of control and become dangerous.” Apparently skilled at ignoring the obvious, these officials have never noticed that the corporate behavior of their partner, Boeing, has vastly exceeded the “potential” to become dangerous.

One of the great ironies of the episode is that above the April 28 Post-Dispatch story which described events at Washington University was another front page story reporting that Boeing was abandoning efforts to outsource much of its work. It approvingly announced that this would save 550 St. Louis jobs.

Of course, the Post-Dispatch has not published stories regarding the creation of peace-related jobs for Boeing employees if the war-manufacturer were to be downsized. Also worthy of note is the fact that no Boeing executive or government official working with them has been arrested for crimes against humanity, complicity with genocide or any other charge. Maybe they would have to peacefully sit in a tent on the Washington University campus to get busted.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

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Invisible Man

Hermilo Herrero, 35, had been stuck inside the Harris County jail for months. He was bewildered and angry. He’d been serving a drug sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont, Texas, when he was indicted for a cold case murder he swore he did not commit, then dragged to Houston to face trial. There was no evidence linking him to the crime save for a pair of informants enlisted by prosecutor Kelly Siegler. On the stand, they claimed that Herrero had confessed to the 1995 murder of his friend Albert Guajardo. In April 2002, Herrero was sentenced to life.

Herrero was awaiting transfer back to FCI Beaumont when he saw that a man named Jeffrey Prible was about to stand trial down the road for murdering a family in Houston. The case was familiar — Herrero had read about it in the Houston Chronicle. Prible was charged at almost the exact same time as Herrero, and both cases involved murders gone cold. But the more Herrero learned about Prible’s case, the more disturbed he was by the parallels. As in Herrero’s case, an informant claimed Prible had confessed to him at Beaumont. And as in Herrero’s case, the informant made a deal with Siegler that could get him out of prison early.

Herrero had seen his share of legal trouble. But Siegler turned him into a cartoon villain at trial, comparing him to the notorious mobster John Gotti. Siegler told jurors that after running into Guajardo at a bar, Herrero had attacked him from the backseat of a moving van, slitting his throat and beating his head with a hammer. He rolled Guajardo’s body in a rug, Siegler said, and threw it on the side of the road. Although the lead investigator, Harris County homicide detective Curtis Brown, bluntly conceded on the stand that he’d found no evidence implicating Herrero, Siegler and her snitches convinced the jury that he had committed the brutal murder.

The informants who testified against Herrero were also at Beaumont on drug crimes. Their convictions came out of a tough-on-crime era that saw the federal prison population explode. Spurred by the war on drugs, sentences grew longer, and for those convicted after 1987, the sweeping Sentencing Reform Act eliminated federal parole altogether.

For people serving long sentences with no end in sight, providing information to the government became one of the only ways to win early release. Although Rule 35 had been part of federal criminal procedure for decades, the drug war transformed it from a provision that merely gave judges a chance to show mercy to one that required incarcerated people to provide “substantial assistance” to prosecutors for any chance at leniency. Informing on their peers was a deal many were willing to make — even if it meant lying on the stand.

Within such a population, men like Herrero and Prible were sitting ducks. Not only were they facing new charges while in federal prison, but both had been charged with murder — the kind of high-stakes prosecution that could yield significant benefits for anyone who offered intel.

Herrero knew the men who testified against him: Jesse Moreno and Rafael Dominguez. Moreno was the star witness, “pretty much the crux of this case,” Siegler said in her opening statement. Although she told jurors that she would only vouch for Moreno’s Rule 35 motion if he told the truth, to Herrero, this was a cruel joke. Like Prible, he swore the case against him had been blatantly fabricated.

It was only when Herrero was finally being transferred out of Houston, waiting in the holding tank to go back to Beaumont, that he happened to meet someone who had insight into just how connected the two cases were. The man was Black, in his late 20s, stocky and bald. He went by Brother Walker.

“He told me he knew everything about what happened to me and a guy named Prible,” Herrero recalled. According to Walker, Beaumont was home to a ring of informants who gave Siegler information to use against defendants in state cases in exchange for her help in their federal cases. Moreno and Dominguez were part of this ring, as was Michael Beckcom, the star witness against Prible. The head of the operation was a man who lurked in the background of both Prible’s and Herrero’s cases, someone who supposedly heard both men confess yet was conspicuously absent from both trials: Nathan Foreman.

A relative of the legendary boxer George Foreman, Nathan Foreman arrived at FCI Beaumont in early 2000 for federal drug crimes. He was placed in the Special Housing Unit, nicknamed the SHU, where he worked as an orderly. The job gave him some freedom of movement, allowing him to visit different cells. Some knew him as “Green Eyes.” Others called him “Bones.” To Herrero, Foreman was the “invisible man.” He was convinced he’d never seen him. Yet at trial, Siegler repeatedly characterized Foreman as one of Herrero’s associates in prison.

Walker told Herrero that he had firsthand knowledge of the Beaumont snitch ring: Foreman had recruited him too.

Herrero asked if he would be willing to put what he knew in a statement. But Walker was hesitant to get involved. Not long after their return to Beaumont, Herrero was transferred to a different prison. Although he lost touch with Walker, Herrero was determined to share what he’d uncovered with Prible.

Jeffrey Prible in the visitation area at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, on Aug. 26, 2015.

Texas death row is located at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, some 70 miles north of Houston. The state has long been notorious as the execution capital of the country. By the time Prible arrived in November 2002, 29 men had been executed that year alone. Four more would be killed before Christmas.

As Prible tells it, he arrived on death row convinced that it was only a matter of time before somebody realized a mistake had been made. “As bad as this place was, I thought this would all get straightened out,” he said. Growing up on the border of Houston’s north side, Prible had not been raised to mistrust the criminal justice system. His parents were “just middle class, working people,” Prible’s aunt, Cheryl Peterson, said. “We used to believe the police were all righteous and good.”

Nevertheless, Prible would be the first to say that he wasn’t a model citizen. As a teenager, he partied and ran from the cops. “We were stupid as fuck when we were young but goddamn we had fun,” he said. Things got more serious as he got older. At the punishment phase of his trial, his ex-wife said he used cocaine and steroids, which compounded his mood swings. “He could be happy, completely happy one minute, and completely hysterical, crazy mad the next.” At his worst, she said, he was physically and emotionally abusive, threatening to hurt himself or her.

“Jeff was a handful from the time he was little,” Peterson recalled. She said there was a history of bipolar disorder in their family, which she suspected Prible shared, although he was never diagnosed or treated. This was the kind of mitigating factor that might have persuaded a jury to spare his life. But Prible’s lawyers focused instead on portraying him as a loving son, father, and uncle who would never hurt a child. That much was true, according to Peterson, who never believed Prible committed the murders.

Peterson carried guilt over her own unwitting role in the case. While awaiting trial, Prible asked her to send him a copy of the probable cause affidavit laying out the state’s evidence against him. He then recklessly showed it to his neighbors at Beaumont. “That helped set him up,” Peterson said. One man who was incarcerated alongside Prible testified at trial that he’d warned Prible to stop discussing it. “I told him to shut up.”

Not long after Prible arrived at Polunsky, a neighbor on death row named Jaime Elizalde asked him if he’d ever done time in federal prison. Prible said yes, he’d been at Beaumont. Elizalde responded that his good friend, Hermilo Herrero, was locked up at Beaumont. Herrero was innocent, Elizalde told Prible, and he knew this for a fact — because he was the one who had murdered Guajardo.

Herrero’s wife had recently visited Elizalde at Polunsky, and she recognized Prible in the visitation room. Prible said he almost fainted when Elizalde showed him paperwork from Herrero’s case and he saw the people involved: Kelly Siegler, Curtis Brown, and a pair of informants from Beaumont. Elizalde also shared a letter from Herrero, who described meeting a man who knew the whole story of how he and Prible had been set up. Herrero did not know much about the man, only that he was Black and went by Walker.

Correspondence between people incarcerated at different facilities is strictly forbidden. Most communication happens illicitly or by word of mouth, so there is no record of the information Herrero shared. Nor was there a way for Prible to write Herrero directly — any letters would be swiftly confiscated. Nevertheless, from his death row cell, Prible set out to find Walker.

It would not be easy. For one, he didn’t know Walker’s first name. And he got nowhere when he tried to tell his lawyers what he’d learned. After his direct appeal was rejected in 2004, Prible was assigned a new attorney to represent him in state post-conviction proceedings: longtime Houston criminal defense lawyer Roland Moore III. It might have been a reason for optimism; Moore had just won a new trial for a man who was misidentified by a woman coming out of a coma.

Prible was certain that Walker was the key to exposing the conspiracy against him. But to his dismay, Moore seemed unmotivated to find him. Instead, the attorney set about proving that Prible’s trial attorneys had been ineffective, often the most promising path to relief for people on death row.

Among Moore’s claims was that the lawyers had failed to challenge the state’s forensic evidence. A well-respected DNA scientist named Elizabeth Johnson provided a declaration disputing the testimony of Bill Watson, the analyst who claimed that sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth must have been deposited right before she died. Watson did not conduct the microscopic examination necessary to support his conclusions, Johnson wrote. Nor was he apparently aware of studies showing that sperm could be found in oral samples of live individuals many hours after being deposited, including those who rinsed their mouths. Had Prible’s attorneys challenged Watson’s unscientific testimony, it could have been kept out of the trial.

Moore included Johnson’s declaration in a state writ challenging Prible’s conviction. But Prible was furious upon learning that Moore had filed the writ without finding Walker.

“What I don’t understand is what anybody could say that would help,” Moore wrote in a letter to his client. “If the ideal witness came forward like you would dream up in a movie and said, ‘Yes, Kelly Siegler told me to say all those things about Prible’s confessing,’ … then we could have a hearing where this dream witness would say all that. But nobody would believe it. I mean nobody.”

Prible decided to take matters into his own hands. It was one of his neighbors, after all, who provided the tip that could break the case open. Now he just needed someone on the outside to run it down.

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Stroke of Luck

Ward Larkin doesn’t remember exactly when he received the first letter from Prible. As an activist involved in leftist causes, Larkin had been visiting Texas death row for almost a decade by the time they met. Some of the men just wanted someone to talk to. But from the beginning, Prible insisted he was innocent.

Larkin knew better than to roll his eyes. By that point, he’d grown close to a number of condemned men he believed were innocent. At least one had already been executed. Others would eventually be released.

Prible told Larkin that he needed help with something specific. There was a man in federal prison with the last name Walker. He was Black. And he had been incarcerated at Beaumont around 2001. That was all he knew.

Larkin, a computer programmer, scoured the Bureau of Prisons’ public database. He put together a list of men with the last name Walker. One of them, Larry Walker, seemed like a promising match. Larkin sent the man several letters but did not hear back.

He had found the wrong Walker. But by a stroke of luck, his letters made their way to the right man anyway. In 2005, Hurricane Rita pummeled the Texas coast, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to relocate hundreds of people previously housed at Beaumont. Carl Walker ended up at the federal lockup in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was there, on the rec yard, that he spotted a friendly acquaintance he knew as Smiley. Smiley said that his cellmate, Larry Walker, had been receiving letters from someone trying to help a man on Texas death row. Smiley suspected the letters might actually be meant for him. Carl Walker said he immediately guessed what this was about. “I knew the whole thing.”

Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal arrives at the federal courthouse in Houston on Feb. 1, 2008.

As 2007 came to a close, so did Siegler’s final cold case murder prosecution for Harris County, with the conviction of David Temple, a high school football coach accused of killing his pregnant wife, Belinda.

The investigation into Belinda’s murder had been dormant for years before Siegler dusted it off and, without any new evidence, got a grand jury to indict Temple, who was sentenced to life in prison. It was business as usual for Siegler, but that was about to change.

Siegler’s longtime mentor, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who had announced his intention to run for reelection in 2008, became embroiled in a scandal after the release of emails from his work account, which included intimate messages he’d sent to a co-worker. Rosenthal withdrew his candidacy at the request of the local GOP. That same day, Siegler tossed her hat in the race, casting herself as a reform candidate. A campaign ad billed her as a “bulldog in a chihuahua’s body.” During a candidate forum at the Old Spaghetti Warehouse, Siegler acknowledged there were problems in the DA’s office but insisted that she was the one to fix them. “I am the only one who has worked there for the last 21 years,” she said. “I know how it operates.”

Reminders that she was part of the office’s entrenched culture peppered her campaign. Days after she announced her run, a new cache of Rosenthal’s emails, some involving racist jokes and explicit images, made headlines. A video of men forcibly stripping off women’s shirts in public had been sent by Siegler’s husband, who was Rosenthal’s doctor. Siegler brushed it off. “His sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly,” she said of her husband, but he could do what he wanted on his own computer because “he’s the boss.” She dismissed the incident as a distraction: “I would hope the voters are more concerned about qualifications of their DA than some inappropriate emails.”

Siegler’s qualifications were impressive, but the emails weren’t the only problem. Early in her career, she’d apologized for using the word “Jew” as a synonym for “cheat” in front of prospective jurors. She said she didn’t know it was a slur because she hadn’t grown up around many Jewish people. There was also an allegation that she’d struck a juror in a death penalty case because he was Black. Not true, she said; she’d struck the man because he was a member of the megachurch led by televangelist Joel Osteen. Its congregants were “screwballs and nuts,” she explained. She later apologized and said that by striking the juror, she was just trying to weed out those who would shy away from imposing a death sentence. “You don’t think an aggressive prosecutor hasn’t offended just a few people?” she asked.

Siegler’s campaign amassed a number of law enforcement endorsements, which pushed her through a crowded four-way Republican primary and into a runoff. But it wasn’t enough: She lost to the former chief judge of the county’s criminal courts. On the heels of defeat, Siegler resigned from the DA’s office. “All that this office stands for will always be a part of my heart,” she wrote in her resignation letter. She left her job feeling beaten up, she later told Texas Monthly. She’d imagined spending her career at the DA’s office, and now she was wondering if there would be a second act.

For a while, Siegler maintained an uncharacteristically low profile before blasting back into the headlines in 2010, when she was appointed special prosecutor in the case of Anthony Graves, who’d spent 12 years on death row for a crime he swore he did not commit. After years of legal wrangling, Graves’s conviction was overturned; Siegler was hired to determine whether the state should retry him. That October, she declared that Graves had been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It was an unexpected conclusion from a woman who for so long had been a poster child for the state’s aggressive and unreflective criminal justice system. And it came just as things were beginning to heat up in the case of Jeffrey Prible.

Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler gestures toward defendant David Mark Temple at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston on Nov. 14, 2007.

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Birthday Cake

As an attorney in Houston, James Rytting was familiar with Siegler’s courtroom theatrics. Her most famous stunt, tying her colleague to the headboard of a victim’s bloody bed, expanded her brand beyond Texas’s borders. A TV crew shadowed her during the trial, and the bed scene was reenacted in “The Blue-Eyed Butcher,” a Lifetime movie about the case. “I was actually surprised that the scene caused as much uproar as it did,” Siegler said. “It was just something that seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.”

Rytting taught university-level classes in philosophy and logic before turning to law. Gracile in appearance and earnest in demeanor, he quickly developed a reputation for taking on some of Texas’s most difficult death penalty appeals. In 2008, Rytting was appointed to represent Prible as the case moved into federal court.

Prible had long stopped trusting his appointed attorneys. He’d filed a series of unsuccessful motions on his own behalf arguing that Siegler had colluded with a ring of informants to send him to death row. He sought material in the state’s file related to Beckcom, Foreman, and Walker, along with one of the informants in Herrero’s case. “Siegler went to great lengths to hide her ties to jailhouse informants in Beaumont,” Prible wrote.

On their own, Prible’s motions sounded desperate and conspiratorial. But Rytting took his new client’s claims seriously. “James Rytting was the first one that ever gave us hope,” Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled.

Prible’s trial featured some of Siegler’s dramatic charms, which Rytting equated to the talents of a B-rate actor. She’d played up what little evidence she had in a prosecutorial style equivalent to a radio shock jock, all while apologizing for being crude. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, Siegler said, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours.”

But as Rytting prepared to challenge Prible’s conviction, he saw beyond the cinematic reenactments and blustery rhetoric to something far more insidious.

Although several years had passed since Carl Walker learned Prible was looking for him, he remained reluctant to get involved. In early 2009, however, Rytting’s investigator managed to get Walker on the phone, documenting their conversation in an affidavit. Prible had been set up, Walker confirmed, and he believed Siegler was in on it. According to Walker, Siegler fed information about the crime to Foreman, who passed it to Beckcom, Walker, and others. As Walker understood it, Siegler was concerned about getting around Prible’s alibi: the next-door neighbor who saw Steve Herrera drop Prible off at home several hours before the murders.

Interviews Rytting conducted with other defendants Siegler had prosecuted in the early 2000s revealed additional allegations that supported Prible’s theory and suggested that Siegler’s reliance on jailhouse informants extended beyond Beaumont.

William Irvan was housed next to Prible at the Harris County jail while they were both awaiting trial. In an affidavit, he said that Siegler had offered him a deal via his lawyer: If he informed on Prible, she would agree to a 35-year sentence. Irvan refused. Siegler went on to deploy an informant at Irvan’s trial to help convict him of a cold-case rape and murder, sending him to Texas death row, where he remains.

In a separate affidavit, Tarus Sales told Rytting that while in jail, he was repeatedly placed in proximity to a man he didn’t know. At Sales’s trial, the man testified for Siegler that he and Sales were great friends and Sales had confessed to murder, all of which Sales denied. Sales was also sent to death row, where he remains.

A third man, Danny Bible, recalled seeing Beckcom at the Harris County jail in advance of Prible’s trial. Beckcom approached various men to ask about their cases, gathering notes in a folder, Bible said in an affidavit. He watched as Beckcom talked to Siegler outside court one day, handing her some papers from his folder. Bible, a serial killer who confessed to a 1979 slaying in Houston, was executed in 2016.

And then, of course, there was Herrero, who was serving a life sentence based on the dubious testimony of two informants from Beaumont. Were it not for Herrero’s efforts years earlier to alert Prible to what he’d learned about the snitch scheme, Rytting might never have gone looking for information about Siegler’s use of informants.

With the new intel in hand, Rytting filed a petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. He argued that a band of snitches inside FCI Beaumont, seeking to reduce their prison terms, had conspired to frame Prible using information that Siegler provided to Foreman. But because a state court had never addressed Prible’s informant claims, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison paused the federal action to allow the Texas courts to weigh in. The case landed back in front of the judge who had presided over Prible’s 2002 trial.

In the meantime, Rytting finally arranged to meet Walker in person. On an August morning in 2010, he waited in a room at a low-level federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, tape recorder in hand. Walker, wearing his prison-issued khakis, strode in, sat down, and laid it all out.

Jeffrey Prible and Hermilo Herrero were both incarcerated at Beaumont in 2001 when Kelly Siegler charged them with murders they swore they did not commit. In a chance encounter while awaiting transfer, Herrero met a man who said he knew the whole story of how the two had been set up. The man, who went by Brother Walker, said a ring of informants at Beaumont offered Siegler information about their neighbors in exchange for her help securing time cuts.

Walker was just 26 when he got popped on federal crack charges. Thanks to the racist sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. When Walker arrived at Beaumont in the summer of 2000, he was scared and depressed, he told Rytting, according to a transcript of their meeting. “That’s more time in prison than I’ve actually been alive.”

Seeking solace, Walker gravitated to the prison church, where he sang in the choir. His devotion earned him the nickname “Brother Walker.” Being pious, a Houston native, and in prison for the first time put Walker on Foreman and Beckcom’s radar. It was a choice mix of factors that would signal credibility to a prosecutor vetting an informant. Foreman and Beckcom approached Walker with an opportunity, a “blessing,” he said. A guy named Jeff Prible would be coming to their unit. If Walker informed on Prible, he’d likely be able to get his sentence reduced. “That’s the pitch,” Walker explained.

Rytting intervened: Foreman and Beckcom knew Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived? “How could they possibly have known that?” he asked.

Walker replied that he didn’t know for sure, but “from what I understand, they were all in cahoots with the prosecutor.” Foreman handed out Siegler’s number to guys at Beaumont like mints after a meal. Walker wrote the number in his address book. Siegler was worried about the case, Foreman and Beckcom told him; where evidence was concerned, she had “little to none,” and she needed a confession to link Prible to the murders.

Foreman and Beckcom gave him details of the crime, Walker said, including where the bodies were located and the fact that DNA was found in Tirado’s mouth. They also told him that while Prible had an alibi, he had supposedly returned to Herrera’s house to slaughter the family.

“All of this was discussed before you even laid eyes on Prible?” Rytting asked.

“Before I even seen the man,” Walker said.

Walker was conflicted. Having been ratted on himself, he had little respect for informants, and being tagged a snitch in prison could be dangerous. At the same time, the crime Prible was accused of was heinous. If he was behind the deaths of three kids, then he deserved what was coming to him.

Walker decided to go along with the scheme. He joined Foreman, Beckcom, and several others in befriending Prible. They staged photos with him during visiting hours. Seven of them surrounded Prible in one shot, standing in front of a backdrop illustrated with palm trees and fluffy white clouds. In another, Foreman and Beckcom smiled broadly alongside Prible, all three accompanied by family members. The idea was to show how chummy they were — evidence that could go a long way toward corroborating their account of Prible’s confession.

Beckcom also scored some wine, expensive contraband made from commissary grape juice, and they got Prible drunk on the rec yard, trying to loosen his lips. It didn’t work; Prible got so inebriated they had to help him back to his cell. As far as Walker knew, Prible never did confess to the crime. But it didn’t really matter. They had enough details to sink him without Prible ever saying a word. “That’s the thing,” Walker told Rytting. “If I know your favorite color is blue, and I go through all this trouble to make you tell me blue, whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

“Whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

Foreman and Beckcom instructed Walker to send Siegler a letter expressing his willingness to testify against Prible. Walker didn’t write the letter, which someone else typed up for him in the law library, but he did sign it. He didn’t know if it was ever sent because in the end, he decided to withdraw from the plot. “Can I live with knowing that I am going to openly lie about information I have no idea about and send this man to death?” Walker asked. “I concluded that I could not do that.”

Rytting told him that in Beckcom’s version of events, Prible had confessed to Beckcom and Foreman on the rec yard. “That’s bullshit,” Walker replied. There are only three things to do in prison, he said: Watch, listen, and do your time. Private conversations are generally confined to cells, not public spaces. For Foreman and Beckcom, that posed a problem, Walker said. They lived in a different housing block than Prible, so there was no way to allege they’d ever had an intimate conversation with the man. Instead, they’d have to say Prible confessed in the open, among a throng of others, which, Walker said, was nuts to anyone with any clue how prison works. “Who talks about murdering somebody when any ears in the surrounding area could hear? It’s just not logical.”

Walker said he’d been apprehensive about coming forward, but the situation still weighed on him. He knew there could be serious repercussions for helping someone who might be guilty — and he didn’t have any idea if Prible was guilty. “Nobody’s going to give you a pat on the back for releasing somebody who was suspected of such a horrendous crime,” he said. “And it’s not that I am looking for a pat on the back. I just don’t want something else in the back.” But the bottom line was that he believed Prible had been set up, and that was wrong. “I just know these guys is guilty of conspiring against him,” he told Rytting. “I know that for a fact. I do know for a fact that Kelly Siegler was involved.”

“Prible was dead the day he hit the yard,” Walker said. “They had already baked a cake for the man. He just didn’t know it was his birthday.”

Criminal Court Judge Mark Kent Ellis at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston on Nov. 5, 2008.

Back in Houston, Rytting asked Mark Kent Ellis, the state judge who presided over Prible’s trial, to inspect Siegler’s files for any materials that should have been disclosed to defense lawyers. Among the items Harris County prosecutors handed over was a sealed envelope marked “attorney work product.” Inside were three letters from would-be Beaumont informants, including Walker.

The sequestered letters were strikingly similar. Each referenced previous communications with Siegler and reinforced the idea that Prible had killed Herrera in a dispute over money. The formatting was identical, and all three contained the same misspelling of Prible’s name as “Pribble,” suggesting a common author.

As Siegler might remember from “previous conversations with Nathan Foreman,” Walker’s letter began, he and several other guys from Houston had grown close to Prible; sharing a hometown put Prible at ease. “At first Jeff would only talk about the bank jobs he had pulled, but later he began to open up about the murders and how he did what he thought he had to do. It was business, not personal,” the letter read. “I’m more than willing to testify to these things in court. … I will help you in any way I can and would appreciate any help you could give me.”

“Steve had screwed him out of some money so he did what he had to do,” read a letter signed by Jesse Gonzalez, who enclosed a photo of himself with Prible.

“Pribble confided in me of Steve owing him some money from the banks they were robbing together, and how he had gone back that night to get what belonged to him,” the third letter, from a man named Mark Martinez, read. “I am more than willing to testify to these things in court.”

Martinez later told his prison counselor that “some dudes” at Beaumont had “been pressured” to write letters to Siegler. He neither wrote nor signed the letter, he said, but would not elaborate. The counselor confirmed that Martinez’s signature did not match the one on the letter he purportedly signed, according to a defense investigator’s affidavit.

Rytting tried to persuade the judge that the state had gone to great lengths to conceal the plot to frame Prible. Only now, with the information Walker provided and the documents discovered in Siegler’s files, were facts emerging that could prove the conspiracy. But Ellis was unmoved. While he concluded that Walker was “present during the planning of the alleged conspiracy” to inform on Prible, he quickly dismissed the revelation. Prible’s allegations were “unpersuasive” and full of “speculation,” he ruled, noting there was no evidence that Beckcom had recanted his account of Prible’s confession.

After an unsuccessful appeal, Rytting prepared to revive his case in federal court.

Yolanda McClary, left, and Kelly Siegler, right, in Season 1 of “Cold Justice” in 2013.

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Show on the Road

TNT aired the inaugural episode of its first reality show, “Cold Justice,” in 2013, starring Siegler and former crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary. Produced by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, the pilot investigated the case of a woman in Cuero, Texas, who died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted bullet to the head. In the span of a week, Siegler and her co-stars concluded that the woman had actually been killed by her husband; he was charged and pleaded guilty to murder.

“Cold Justice” was a hit. Fans were drawn to Siegler and McClary for their gumption, expertise, and empathy toward victims’ families. Critics liked that the series focused on small towns rather than big cities. “Siegler and McClary are attractive and photogenic, yet never ham it up on camera or glamorize their jobs,” one reviewer wrote. “They’re eminently professional.”

The show was Siegler’s idea. In her years as a Harris County prosecutor, she had served on a committee that reviewed cold cases across the state. “I realized that a lot of these agencies have cases that are really close to being solved,” she told Texas Monthly. “That’s where the idea started, and after I left the DA’s office, I tried to sell it to a couple of people out in the LA world, and one day I got hooked up with Dick Wolf. … He immediately loved the idea.”

The real-world impact was mixed from the start. After the pilot aired, an article titled “Lukewarm Justice” was printed in the professional journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Authored by the DA who handled the Cuero case, he described how the publicity created a nightmare when it came to selecting a jury, leading to a mistrial. While he praised Siegler and her co-stars, he was disgusted with the producers, who refused to push the air date until after the trial. “‘Justice’ was out the window and ‘cold’ was all that remained,” he wrote.

Coverage of the show steered clear of such controversies. In interviews, Siegler pushed the lesson she wanted audiences to take from her work. If “Cold Justice” had a mantra, she said, it was: “There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence cases, oh my God! People, would you quit thinking that!”

By the time “Cold Justice” finished its third season, however, Siegler and TNT were facing the first of several defamation lawsuits. A man Siegler accused of murdering his wife, who was later acquitted, alleged that the show used coercive tactics by telling the local DA’s office that the episode would not be televised if the DA declined to seek an indictment. The producers denied the allegation, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed. (To date, the other defamation suits have also been unsuccessful.)

In another episode, a Georgia prosecutor decided to move forward with the case Siegler assembled only for a judge to issue a scathing ruling years later, dropping all charges against the defendants and barring the state from pursuing them in the future.

“It is doubtful defendants would have ever been charged based on the record of this case in the absence of interest from a California entertainment studio 10 years after the crime was committed,” the judge wrote. The studio profited from the “scandalous allegations” but had “no burden of proof in a court of law,” he continued. “This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

TNT canceled “Cold Justice” after the third season. After a brief hiatus, the show found a new home on Oxygen as part of the network’s pivot to true-crime programming.

“This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

In the meantime, Siegler’s record in Texas started to come under scrutiny for the first time. In July 2015, a district court overturned the conviction of David Temple, the high school football coach Siegler had put on trial for killing his pregnant wife. The judge found that Siegler had withheld evidence dozens of times in violation of Brady v. Maryland, a landmark Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

Siegler’s justification of her conduct was almost as stunning as the violations themselves. “Of enormous significance,” the judge wrote, was her testimony insisting that she was only obligated to turn over exculpatory evidence that she believed to be true.

“If Kelly’s bizarre interpretation … were ever to be the law, then all a prosecutor would ever have to do to keep any witness statement away from the defense is say, ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’” Paul Looney, an attorney who worked on the Temple case, told the Houston Press. “If Kelly Siegler’s a lawyer in five years, I’ll be shocked.”

Before long, Siegler’s conduct in other cases was being questioned. The Houston Chronicle published a story citing similar allegations in the death penalty case of Howard Guidry. “Here it is — the same patterns and practices,” Guidry’s lawyer told the paper. She argued in court that Siegler had withheld critical evidence from Guidry’s trial attorneys, including fingerprints found at the crime scene that belonged to someone other than their client. Guidry’s appeals have since been denied.

For Prible and his neighbors on death row, the questions suddenly swirling about Siegler’s conduct were woefully overdue. While Siegler was promoting “Cold Justice” to a friendly press, an incarcerated writer at Polunsky named Thomas Whitaker published a sprawling series about Prible’s case on his blog, Minutes Before Six, with the help of supporters on the outside. Drawing on case records as well as conversations with Prible, Whitaker wrote in exhaustive and vivid detail about Prible’s legal saga.

While Siegler was basking in TV stardom, Prible was languishing, talking about his case to anyone who would listen. “I’ve watched his mental state deteriorate over the years,” Whitaker wrote. He recalled hearing thumping from outside his cell, only to discover that Prible had been slamming his head against the wall. “That is how I see him in my mind’s eye these days, alone, on his hand and knees, the wall splotched crimson, a dull knocking sound echoing down the run. And no one, no one, is listening.”

Jeffrey Prible, left, and Nathan Foreman, right, in the visitation area of FCI Beaumont.

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Ticket Out of Jail

As Rytting peeled back the layers in Prible’s case, he became convinced that it was inextricably linked to that of Hermilo Herrero. Herrero’s innocence claim had gotten a temporary boost in 2005, when Jaime Elizalde, Herrero’s friend on Texas death row, gave a sworn statement confessing to being the real killer in the case. Elizalde later pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer questions on the matter in court. He was executed in 2006. But the records Rytting obtained supported what Herrero had long suspected: that he and Prible were set up by the same ring of Beaumont informants. Rytting took on Herrero’s case pro bono.

Some of the most important records were related to Jesse Moreno, the star witness at Herrero’s trial. As it turned out, it was Moreno who gave Siegler Foreman’s name in the first place. Moreno had a history of cutting deals with the state. In 1997, while he was serving a federal sentence for drug crimes, Siegler put him on the stand to testify against another man on trial for murder. Siegler wrote a Rule 35 letter on Moreno’s behalf, but it did not result in a sentence reduction.

In 2001, Moreno got back in touch with Siegler while at Beaumont, reminding her of his previous assistance, which he felt had gone unrewarded, and offering “some info that can be helpful for you on an unsolved case.” In a tape-recorded, in-person conversation that July, he told Siegler that Herrero had confessed to him more than a year and a half earlier, in 1999. Foreman and Rafael Dominguez were both present for the confession, he said. There was one problem: Foreman wasn’t at Beaumont in 1999.

By the time Moreno took the stand at Herrero’s trial, Foreman had disappeared from his account of Herrero’s confession. Meanwhile, Dominguez, the second informant Siegler called as a witness, testified that Foreman was present for two subsequent confessions by Herrero.

Although Siegler told jurors that Moreno had put his life on the line to share what he knew, Moreno testified that he didn’t have much of a choice: Herrero had put a hit on him after discovering that he had assisted authorities in other cases. The threat was so dire that Moreno was put in protective custody and eventually transferred away from Beaumont. Cooperating with Siegler in the hopes of receiving a time cut was the only way to get out of federal prison alive, Moreno said. “Either that or I’m dead.”

But memos Rytting obtained from the Bureau of Prisons dismantled this story. Records documenting Moreno’s transfers made no mention of Herrero, suggesting instead that Moreno feared for his life because he’d crossed a prison gang for which he’d been smuggling drugs. He was shipped out of Beaumont after cooperating with officials investigating the illicit activity. As Rytting later argued, Siegler allowed “false and misleading testimony from Moreno about when and why he decided to turn state’s witness against Herrero.”

As he worked to untangle the web of informants, Rytting realized he needed help and enlisted a civil lawyer named Gretchen Scardino. Born and raised in Texas, Scardino had worked on death penalty litigation as a summer law clerk at the California State Public Defender’s Office. “My eyes were opened enough to know that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I might be getting in over my head,” she recalled. After graduating law school, she turned to civil practice.

But the desire to return to capital litigation didn’t go away. She had never understood the logic behind the death penalty, that punishing someone for murder should mean committing murder in response. She’d also learned from a young age that deadly violence was rooted in complex problems, and those who killed were often vulnerable themselves. A family friend had murdered his parents after becoming schizophrenic. “Knowing him before he became mentally ill and before he did this crime probably had a pretty big effect on me as a young person,” she said.

Prible’s case was Scardino’s reintroduction to death penalty work. She started out by reading the case record and trial transcripts. “I really thought that there must be a volume of the transcript missing,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that someone could be convicted of such a horrible crime and sentenced to death based on what I had seen.”

Although the Prible case presented a steep learning curve, her lack of experience also served her well: Unlike civil litigation, which involves obtaining large amounts of discovery as a matter of course, in federal death penalty appeals, “you don’t automatically get discovery,” she said. A judge has to grant permission every step of the way. But Scardino didn’t know this at the time. “I just approached it as, ‘Let’s ask for everything that we would ask for if it was a regular civil case,’” she said. “And that’s kind of what broke it open.”

In early 2016, a critical piece fell into place. After leaving Beaumont, Foreman had been sentenced to decades in state prison. Thirteen years after his role in the snitch ring first came to light in a chance encounter between Walker and Herrero, Foreman decided to talk. The result was a pair of affidavits, one in Prible’s case and one in Herrero’s.

The affidavits did not address whether Foreman had been the leader of the snitch ring, as Walker described. But contrary to the claims made by the informants in both cases, Foreman said he never heard either man confess. “Prible did not brag in my presence about killing an entire family,” Foreman said. “Prible did not tell me that he was the kind of man who can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean or say that he was a bad motherfucker.” When Prible talked about Steve Herrera, “he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

Foreman confirmed something Walker said: that men incarcerated at Beaumont joked about how Prible would be their “ticket out of jail.” Although Prible discussed his case with Foreman, “I learned information about his case from Kelly Siegler too,” he said in his affidavit. She “knew that FCI inmates wanted to testify against Prible in return for help getting their federal sentence reduced.” According to Foreman, his first meeting with Siegler took place in August 2001. “I think it was before I even met Prible,” he said.

Soon afterward, Prible’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison to order the Harris County DA’s office to hand over any trial material that was “withheld from the defense on the basis that it is work product, privileged, or otherwise confidential.” The DA’s office eventually agreed to submit hundreds of pages to Ellison for a determination on whether they should have been disclosed.

Almost five months later, Ellison issued his order. He had identified a number of records that “possibly contain exculpatory information,” including 19 pages of handwritten notes. The notes were written by Siegler and her investigator Johnny Bonds. Some were hard to decipher, but a few things jumped out immediately. The notes confirmed that Siegler and Bonds had met with Foreman to discuss the Prible case on August 8, 2001. At the meeting, Foreman had positioned himself as an informant, offering intel about an apparent confession by Prible. One note said Prible showed “Ø remorse.”

The notes suggested that Foreman might not have had his facts straight. He seemed to be under the impression that Prible’s own family had been murdered. But if Siegler was skeptical at the time, there was no hint of it in the records, which showed that she met with Foreman again in December.

The notes dramatically undercut the scenario Siegler presented at Prible’s trial, in which Beckcom and Foreman met Prible through a casual encounter on the rec yard. In reality, Siegler had discussed the case with Foreman before Prible was even indicted. “Oh my god. I cannot believe that this has been hidden,” Scardino remembers thinking. “This puts the lie to the whole story about Beckcom and Foreman just coincidentally coming into contact with Jeff.”

Just as damning were notes that appeared to undermine key forensic evidence Siegler presented at Prible’s trial. Prosecutors had elicited testimony from a DNA analyst who claimed that the sperm found in Tirado’s mouth had to have been deposited shortly before she was murdered. But the notes showed that Siegler had consulted a different forensic expert, the director of the police crime lab in Pasadena, Texas, whose analysis did not support the inflammatory theory she presented at trial. “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours,” Siegler had written.

“So much of the trial was just this really horrific narrative spun by the prosecution,” Scardino said. In her closing argument, Siegler asserted that Prible had shot Tirado moments after forcing her to perform oral sex. But Siegler’s own notes made clear that the evidence didn’t support this.

To Scardino, the revelations were a bombshell. “I thought, ‘Oh wow. We’re gonna win this case.’”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

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Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

Kelly Siegler, left, and Yolanda McClary, center, on Season 1 of “Cold Justice” in 2013.

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

“American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information.”

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue, she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

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House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

Prosecutor Kelly Siegler, right, points toward defendant Susan Wright, left, during closing arguments at Wright’s murder trial on March 2, 2004, in Houston.

3

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A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country. Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

The Season 4 “Cold Justice” cast from left to right: Aaron Sam, Steve Spingola, Tonya Rider, Kelly Siegler, and Johnny Bonds.

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

The Harris County Criminal Justice Center on Sept. 12, 2023, in Houston.

4

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Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak.

“It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

A group photo taken at FCI Beaumont on the day that Jeffrey Prible, right, allegedly confessed to Michael Beckcom, center, and Nathan Foreman, left. The three men are accompanied by their parents.

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

The post Senegal and the Politics of Protest: an Interview With Kelly Duke Bryant appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Falcone.

What is it about many modern day Republican candidates?

If they win an election, everything is on the up and up. If they lose, something was amiss and certainly unfair.

Defeated Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly is the most recent example. After it became clear Tuesday night that Janet Protasiewicz would defeat him by a wide margin, he had nothing but bad things to say about his opponent.

She's a serial liar, he proclaimed in a speech at the swank Heidel House Hotel in Green Lake.

"I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent," he told his assembled supporters. "But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede."

Kelly called Protasiewicz's campaign "deeply deceitful, dishonorable and despicable."

"My opponent is a serial liar," he continued. "She's disregarded judicial ethics; she's demeaned the judiciary with her behavior. This is the future that we have to look forward to in Wisconsin."

This from the candidate whose campaign backers, including Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, sponsored an ad that used a Milwaukee rape victim's case to declare that Protasiewicz had a soft spot in her heart for sexual predators.

The ad, which claimed the Milwaukee judge had unleashed the perpetrator to again prey on the innocent, so upset the victim that she spoke out in Protasiewicz's defense.

"It immediately took my breath away," she said of the ad. "To see it in action, I wondered if there was any thought put into the human beings behind the cases."

Both sides in the campaign used inflammatory, low-ball TV spots, but for Kelly to suggest he was above it all is nothing short of laughable. In fact, the former justice was up on TV early and often suggesting his opponent was soft on criminals, cherry picking a handful of sentences out of the hundreds she had administered while on the circuit court bench.

What was so ludicrous about all those multimillion dollar attack ads is that Supreme Court justices don't rule on such cases in the first place.

Kelly closed his concession talk with, "I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it."

No, it's the other way around. Kelly, absurdly claiming that he would only rule on the principles of law and not his political beliefs, was all set to rubber stamp the right-wing Republican legislative agenda, as had the justice he was hoping to replace, Patience Roggensack. The gerrymanderers, the opponents of a woman's right to choose, the vote suppressors were all lined up.

Lucky for us, the voters sent them away.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dave Zweifel.

Daniel Kelly, the right-wing former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who lost his bid to re-join the high court on Tuesday as liberal circuit court judge Janet Protasiewicz won by a decisive margin, refused to concede to his opponent in a speech that one critic said personified the Republican Party's approach to electoral politics in recent years.

"It brings me no joy to say this," Kelly told supporters. "I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent. But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede."

Kelly acknowledged that he lost the election and said he "respected" the decision made by more than 55% of Wisconsin voters who chose Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County Circuit judge who was outspoken about her support for abortion rights and labor unions, to join the court, giving Democratic-aligned justices a 4-3 majority.

But he denounced Protasiewicz as a "serial liar" and accused her of disregarding judicial ethics and demeaning the judiciary "with her behavior."

"This is just what Republicans do now," said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Progressive Chicago-based news outlet Heartland Signalaccused Kelly of going "full sour grapes."

In the two-and-a-half years since former Republican President Donald Trump urged his supporters to attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and refused to acknowledge his loss, a number of losing GOP candidates have demanded recounts, claimed their elections were "rigged," and spread baseless conspiracy theories about voting irregularities.

"Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this has become mainstream," Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law's Safeguarding Democracy Project, toldAxios last year. "It's exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers' consent."

As Common Dreamsreported earlier this week, Kelly claimed to be nonpartisan during the campaign, but has received funding from vehemently anti-union billionaires and has ruled in the past in the favor of allowing people to carry concealed weapons on public transit. He has also written blog posts in the past saying that people who support abortion rights want "to preserve sexual libertinism" and denouncing marriage equality and people who rely on Medicare and Social Security benefits.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Progressives in Wisconsin and across the United States are warning that Tuesday's upcoming state Supreme Court election will have implications for working families nationwide, as a liberal judge who has been outspoken about her support for abortion rights and labor unions faces a right-wing former justice funded by dark money.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz is running against former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly. The contest, which will decide whether the high court leans left or right, has become the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with the candidates, political parties, and outside groups pouring $30 million into the election.

Wisconsin Watch at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reported last week that Protasiewicz has raised nearly $12 million more than her opponent as the judge issues warnings that a victory for Kelly would mean the court would almost certainly uphold an 1849 law that went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, making abortion illegal in almost all cases including pregnancies that result from rape or incest.

"I can tell you that if my opponent is elected," Protasiewicz told supporters recently, "that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books."

\u201cThe Wisconsin Supreme Court could play a pivotal role shaping reproductive freedom in the state. Judge Protasiewicz is running against Daniel Kelly, who is endorsed by anti-choice extremists.\u201d

— NARAL (@NARAL) 1680547613

While Kelly has claimed during the campaign that he is nonpartisan, political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen explained in a video produced with pro-worker media outlet More Perfect Union that the former state Supreme Court justice has made his political leanings perfectly clear in previous public statements and rulings.

"For candidates who have a lot to hide, never talking about your politics is actually extremely convenient," Cohen said of Kelly, who before launching his supposedly nonpartisan campaign ruled that people in Madison, Wisconsin should be permitted to carry concealed weapons on public transit and that a fossil fuel company should not be required to protect the public from water it polluted.

Kelly's funders include Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, "a pair of billionaires who are laser focused on transforming their home state of Wisconsin," Cohen said. The Uihleins have previously donated to anti-democracy causes like "the dismantling of unions" through the passage of Act 10, which eliminated collective bargaining for most public employees and contributed to a dramatic decline in union membership in the state.

Kelly's backers had spent about $2 million more than Protasiewicz's supporters on ads as of March 27, according to Wisconsin Watch.

"If they succeed," said More Perfect Union on Monday, "MAGA Republicans will control the state's highest court—a disaster for working people."

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are working "to reach every union member in the state and as many other voters as possible" ahead of the election, according to IBEW Local 494 political director Ryan Neibauer, by canvassing door-to-door, visiting job sites, and phonebanking.

"We're letting people know that labor is supporting Judge Janet, and we think that can pull her across the finish line with a win," Neibauer said in a statement late last month. "There are so many things on the table and so many things we can do with a pro-worker majority."

Anti-union justices have had a 4-3 majority prior to the election, but with right-wing Justice Patience Roggensack retiring, "a Protasiewicz win levels the playing field and gives working families and their allies a fighting chance," said IBEW.

As progressive Wisconsin columnist John Nichols wrote in The Capital Times on Sunday, electing Protasiewicz to secure a liberal majority on the high court would give the state its first chance to address a "radically gerrymandered" district map drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2011, which allowed the party to hold both legislative chambers for more than a decade even as Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections.

"This pattern will not change unless a majority of justices agree to revisit the issue," wrote Nichols. "That certainly won't happen if conservatives retain their current 4-3 majority following the April 4 election... If the seat flips and liberals take charge of the court, however, Wisconsin's legislative and congressional maps could be challenged on a variety of grounds, and perhaps redrawn."

"The stakes could not be higher," Nichols added. "And the contrast between the candidates could not be clearer."

Cohen noted that Tuesday's election could also decide whether former President Donald Trump will be able to successfully challenge the 2024 election results, as he attempted to in 2020, if he continues his campaign for president.

"Just look how close he came to doing it in Wisconsin in 2020," Cohen said. "The state Supreme Court narrowly sided with empirical reality in a 4-3 ruling, and it's not a huge mystery how Kelly might rule if he were presented with a similar case. That's bad news for all of us."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

I started writing poems in high school. My parents split when I was young, and my mom would send me packages with journals and books of poetry. It’s funny looking back, she sent me some poems that were absolutely indecipherable at the time. I was 10 years old and getting a book of Adrienne Rich poems that made no sense to me. I wrote a lot in those journals, but didn’t start taking poetry seriously until after college, when I went to grad school to get my MFA in fiction. At grad school, a lot of my friends were poets.

One of my friends, George—he’s from Alabama and is such a kindhearted guy—I enjoyed the way he talked about writing and the way he talked about reading and the way he really loved poems. I would write poems in between my story workshops, and we would read them aloud together. He convinced me to join a poetry class during my last semester of grad school. I feel really grateful that my introduction to poetry was not through a completely institutional lens—it was through the friends on the other side of the institution. My education in poetry came through this companionship.

As for a particular poem, I have one tattoo, which I got when I was 22. It’s an American buffalo on my back. And it’s because my friend Jeremiah showed me a poem called “For the Last American Buffalo” by a poet named Steve Scafidi from West Virginia. It’s a beautiful, long poem about this guy plodding along with a buffalo across the country. The last few lines are, “When you see [the buffalo] again, say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do…it doesn’t know you are here for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.”

So I have those words underneath the buffalo: “Tell it you do and why.” The poem still moves me. It moved me tremendously back then, in a visceral way. So all of that together was happening around the same time in my life. And the people I was most drawn to were poets.

Do you remember the first poem that you wrote that made you realize that it was something you wanted to commit to? Did it surprise you?

I do. I wrote one poem called “Reasons to Quit” that I used to know by heart, because I read it every time I gave an in-person reading. It was the first poem I remember exactly where I was when I wrote it. I remember writing it at my desk in my apartment on 130th Street, which is by a window. I remember the last six or seven lines, which were in couplets. It was a free verse poem in couplets. I wish I knew it by heart still. I just remember at a certain point in the act of writing the poem, it sounds cliche to say, the poem started to write itself. What I mean by that simply is that when the words came and they were on the page, the primary sensation was, to use your word, surprise. Knowing that the words I was writing were coming from somewhere inside myself, but not knowing what they would be as they came out, and when they did, it was almost as if the poem was revealing the truth of myself to myself. And I think it is one of the most wonderful sensations. It doesn’t happen often. Surprise is always the word. I want people who write to give themselves permission to be surprised by themselves, because it’s such a beautiful thing when it happens.

Do you not get that same sense of surprise from writing fiction?

I actually do. I made such a huge shift from fiction to poetry. But I loved writing short stories in grad school. I wrote so many so quickly, I viewed them as experiments, as little bursts of magic. I actually just finished a final draft of a novel a few months ago. Spending an hour or two every night with the novel almost every day, I didn’t know where I’d end up. I knew where it would begin, but not where it would go. So I think it’s there, a little bit more of a drawn out surprise, than in a poem. I grew to really look forward to the time I spent with it, because I was ready to be surprised. Whereas in a poem, there’s a moment, an image, a feeling, and a line comes out from you. It’s a little bit breathtaking how quickly it happens.

Could you explain like I’m one of your high school students, the difference between fiction and poetry?

I want to say there is none and just leave it at that.

But I’m 14 and that answer does not suffice.

Yeah. [laughs]. It’s a great on the spot question. I would say fiction is an act of writing where your primary concern is telling and shaping a story. And poetry is an act of writing where your primary concern is language. It’s an insufficient definition, though. There are some absolute poems of novels. When I read Marilynne Robinson, the whole thing feels like a poem. She has care for language and gets to the heart and soul of something. But her work is not a poem. It’s a novel. But there’s a lot of fiction that surprises me. I loved Ducks, Newburyport, which is like a hundred-thousand-word sentence. I was frustrated by it, and I loved it, and I put it down a lot. But I found it playful and critical and fun. Most of all, I found it fun. My friend Sasha Fletcher wrote a novel Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World and it has an unshakeable and tender voice and it is full of recipes and it is true and soulful and playful, too. So my definition is absolutely insufficient. I have read novels that are entire poems. And poems that hold a story in their heart.

Is there a difference between how you approach writing fiction versus poetry?

I allow a poem to begin with anything. An image, a moment. Sometimes I jot down a line or a phrase on the Notes app of my phone and let it sit there until I’m in a place to turn it into a poem. Actually, to be honest, when I was in the middle of drafting this novel, it was a similar thing. I would sit down to write a scene and just say, “I need to write the next moment.” But what allowed me into the scene was fairly similar. I think of writing like I think of building a house. First you walk through the front door with that first line, first image, first phrase, and ask, “What am I going to do next? Am I going to build a room to my left? And am I going to go into that room? Will I allow it to have a door that leads to another room?” I think of writing as building doors to rooms, and then saying, “Let’s just walk through it. And let’s put in windows to see what the light shows.”

I think of writing as a form of allowance and permission. It’s telling yourself to keep making those doors and walking through them. That, to me, is the blueprint for surprise. When you look up and it’s been an hour or two hours of writing, you’re so far from your first door, you’re in a room you never thought existed. And it didn’t. It didn’t exist in the world. You made it. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s why writing and making art is so special, because you can’t predict what it will look like, sound like, read like, until it’s been made.

So once you built your poem house, how often do you go back and tinker with it? How do you edit something that comes out so mysteriously?

I’m still working on it, especially with poems, The only way I’ve found to do any sort of editing is to rewrite or retype the whole thing. It’s a trick my friend Bud Smith taught me. The Bud Smith secret. All his secrets are just basically, you gotta do the thing. And that really worked for fiction. That’s how I redrafted my novel. Because it’s more than a room. It’s a giant city of rooms. With a poem, I think what’s fun in the revision process is just going through, cutting out a line, cutting out four lines, and seeing what happens.

There’s a lot of pressure for people to make a very polished poem, to keep shining and shining it, and say here, it’s a perfect gem. There are many beautiful poems like that. A lot of Mary Ruefle’s poems are like that. But there’s also beauty to me in what I perceive as excess. One way I define poetry is as a blueprint to a feeling, so every line matters, even if it feels inconsequential or tangential. Even those tangents matter. So revision is really hard for me as a poet. Certain poems call to be revised because they want to look like that gem. Other poems are like, accept me as I am. Accept this mess.

How much do you listen to feedback from others? Do you share your poems before trying to publish them?

Less so now. One of the great sorrows of the pandemic is the loss of community. But I used to run a reading series in New New York City with my friend Katie for five years called Dead Rabbits. It was formative and allowed me to be in conversation with more poets. But I don’t have a lot of peer readers. My friend George—not George from grad school, another George, from Dead Rabbits—he moved out to Denver for his PhD, but when he lived here, every time we saw each other, we would read each other poems. Every single time. It was a beautiful way to begin a friendship. One of my favorite things to do in the world was read poems with him, because we made each other a little better.

Now there are fewer opportunities to read aloud in New York. They’re starting to come back. But now I actually have an answer to your last question. The best way to revise a poem is to take the subway to a reading with the five poems you’re about to read, and just read them to yourself over and over again, nervously saying, No, I can’t say that, and Yeah, I like that. I like to make last-minute edits or edit in the moment of reading. The audience helps. Both the expectation of an audience and the audience itself, hearing your words bounce off the walls of a room and land in other people’s ears. That’s how you know you wrote a good poem, when you get up in the front of a crowd and you feel that it’s right.

When you’re doing a live reading, do you think the poems tend towards clarity over opacity as a rule, to keep the audience from tuning out?

A lot of it’s in the delivery. I’ve heard hundreds of poets read aloud, and there’s no one formula. But I do think that some things change as a result. I’ll find myself at times in a longer poem, inserting these lines, these moments of pure clarity. They’re like thematic statements, or images that are meant to be taken as touchstones.

It’s something George Saunders talks about in fiction. Or it might not be George Saunders, it’s one of those legends, who knows how it’s formed. But maybe-George Saunders said you need moments in a story that operate the same way those little accelerators operate in Mario Kart, where your car goes over it and it zooms along more quickly. Zoom pads? I don’t know if that’s the phrase he used. But I think of this in poetry, too. Inserting these images, these little crystals, these nuggets of things that the reader can gobble up and zoom forward. Something that lets people know they’re alive and reading a poem.

You write essays about all different poems every week. Every poem is different, and the topics vary, but there tends to be a through line supporting vulnerability, openness, and tenderness. Did you come up with a life philosophy or maxim that guides your writing and thinking outside the lens of poetry, or is it emergent from the poems you read?

I think it’s emergent. It’s actually a question I asked myself when I started the newsletter two years ago, in June 2020, in an attempt to be more intentional with my reading and to have an accountable practice. At the time I was very active on Twitter (I’ve since deactivated), but most of my Twitter personality was posting pictures of poems without commentary or context. And I thought, maybe instead of doing that and spending a lot of time on Twitter, I’ll just write about poems. I didn’t really know what would happen. I was hoping it would allow me to be more patient with myself, to move a little more slowly through the world.

I also started this during the height of the pandemic when my work as a high school teacher felt precarious and difficult. I usually write my newsletters on Friday nights, and I relish that time. I find it really sacred. Because while I think about the poems, the poems become a vehicle for me to take intentional time to think about myself and the world. And for the better part of the past two and half years, I’ve found the world lacking in the grace I wish it had. I wanted to be someone who could offer that grace to others, and I look for that grace in poems. So that’s why there’s this throughline—which I’ve noticed too. It’s almost an obsessive reminder to myself, every time I sit down to write the newsletter, to pay attention. It’s okay to remind myself to be tender because when I’m done with this newsletter, I will go into a world that isn’t always tender.

I would love to know more about that process. You write this newsletter every Friday night. What do you do if you sit down to write on Friday night and you don’t know what to say? How do you overcome that?

It happens a lot. If I get back late from going out on a Friday night, it’ll be midnight and I’m like, Oh, I gotta start my newsletter. I usually almost always start it on a Friday night no matter what. Even if it’s just for 30 minutes at midnight, I start and let it marinate. My fiancée has seen me many times on Saturdays editing my newsletter on the phone while we’re out. But ideally I like to write a basic draft on Friday night and then take Saturday to tinker with it in my free time, to add little bits and subtract and reread. I give myself a lot of grace with it and go wherever it goes.

What about the rest of the week? Do you have a daily routine for reading and writing?

I read every morning when I get up for 15-30 minutes. I like to read for 30 minutes to an hour before I go to sleep. And I read on the subway. Anytime I’m on the subway, it’s my favorite thing to do. I read relentlessly. I love it. It’s like, I’m not grateful for the pandemic at all, but I’m grateful that it allowed me space to get into the practice of reading. Now I feel weird and slightly gross if I go a couple days without it. When I’m reading a lot, it feels liberating, because I’m walking around with this big balancing brain that wants to make connections between anything and everything. I feel like I see bigger and feel bigger and dream bigger.

And do you write throughout the week as well?

Less so. It’s partly due to my work. I wrote a lot more when I was an adjunct professor and working part time at a community center. I had a lot more time but it was a much more economically precarious life. My life is less economically precarious now but my work is so much more exhausting. The most difficult part is that it’s emotionally exhausting. I think I’ve said it in my newsletter, but I come home often feeling like my eyes are being vacuumed from the inside of my face. It feels like my eyes are two inches deep in their sockets. I don’t feel as much in a space of creativity. I’m always ready to read, which I’m grateful for, but it’s harder to give myself space to write. It’s one reason I love having the newsletter, because even if it doesn’t feel like creative writing, it is writing, and it makes me feel good to write. It really does. It calms me down and puts me in touch with language, organizing language around something. Honestly sometimes when I’m writing a newsletter I’m like, this is so fun. It’s exhilarating. I don’t want to give that up selfishly because it’s a real joy to me.

You also just wrote a novel.

[laughs]. That’s true. You reminded me. That was born out of practice. I started it a year and a half ago. I would start, stop, start, stop, start, touch, that kind of thing. I was in a place with work where I was expressing literally the same thing I just told you, emotionally exhausted, and I just realized, well, Devin, you gotta just do it. If you love it, if writing means so much to you, then just try to do it a little bit each day. That’s what happened. It worked and I felt great. So thank you for reminding me that I wrote a novel because now it means I just need to do another one so I can feel more in touch with that.

What’s your advice for writers or readers of poetry who are terrified of poetry?

The first advice is to read. Truly read. I used to see my therapist in person—now it’s all digital—but when it was in person he was not far from The Strand bookstore in New York. I would purposely go to The Strand before each session, partly because I was anxious and partly as a little treat to myself. My therapy treat. I’d browse their poetry section, which is never crowded. Half the people there don’t know where it is. I would set my budget at, like seven dollars, and find something. But mostly what I would do is pick books off the shelf and flip through the pages. I’d spend 15 or 20 minutes there and maybe buy a book, maybe not. Then I’d go to therapy. Now I have way too many poetry books—or maybe there is no such thing. But reading is one of the first steps of wonder. I don’t ever want to be in a place where I can’t give myself permission to pick up a book of poems and be absolutely wonderstruck.

I had a teacher once whose advice was to put a book of poetry by your bed, then read one poem before going to sleep, and one poem the moment you wake up. That way the poem you read before sleep would seep into your dreams, and the poem you read when you wake would be jarring and almost in dreamscape because you’re still groggy, trying to figure out the language.

Poetry is not prescriptive. It’s a way of changing how you make connections between yourself and the world. What poetry has taught me is the ability and willingness to give myself permission to write or feel or see or pay attention to things in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise. And I think that permission and that allowance and that willingness to surprise and be surprised, those are all wonderful consequences of a life in poetry. Or they have been for me.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Denise S. Robbins.

He’s the former Penn State assistant football coach and pedophilic monster who started a foundation, The Second Mile, in order to gain sexual access to prepubescent boys, hundreds of whom he molested, until eight heroic ones stepped forward to tell a jury about their ordeals in 2012, resulting in the sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky’s thirty-to-sixty-year prison term.

If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason the witness, a hulking former quarterback named Mike McQueary, didn’t intervene, but on the next morning he did go straight to the legendary football coach Joe Paterno and tell him about the sodomy.

Paterno conferred with the university’s athletic director, Tim Curley, who then involved a vice president, Gary Schultz, and the president, Graham Spanier. Instead of reporting the crime to the police, however, the three officials conspired to cover it up, thus sparing scandal to their all-important football program. As for the rape victim, he couldn’t appear in person at Sandusky’s trial, because nobody knew who he was.

But there’s a problem with what you remember. It’s sheer folklore. True, Sandusky took a shower with a boy. That’s what he often did, quite openly, after a workout together, and the showers typically included innocent horseplay. That behavior had been commonplace in the recreation center where Sandusky was raised.

As for the incident in question, Mike McQueary initially misremembered its date by more than a year, and then probably misdated it again; he wasn’t at all sure he had glimpsed a sex act, and that’s why he had done nothing to stop it; he evidently didn’t mention it to Paterno until weeks later, and then only in passing; and his subsequent inaction and cordiality toward Sandusky indicated that he had reconsidered his initial concern

Most crucially, when a grand jury indictment mentioned sodomy, McQueary protested that his testimony, which prosecutors had been nudging him to make more graphic, had been misconstrued. The email he received in response from Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach said in part, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.” In other words, Eshbach and her team had suborned perjury and were still intending to nail Sandusky with it.

As it happened, they failed in that instance. The jury, reasoning that too much time had elapsed since an event that had no identified victim, and taking note of conflicting versions narrated by McQueary, acquitted Sandusky on the charge. This would be the single greatest irony of the many-sided Sandusky case. When the grand jury presentment became known in November 2011, an accusation that would fail to be sustained in July 2012 completed Sandusky’s demonization in the media.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The post Kim Kelly appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

• At a Kabul press conference given by ex-President Hamid Karzai in February, the room was full of journalists. At least 12 TV cameras and multimedia reporters jockeyed for position at the back of the room to record the former president’s tongue-lashing of the U.S. administration after it took $3.5 billion dollars in Afghan foreign reserves and gave it to victims of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

• When a powerful earthquake rumbled through Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province in June, killing more than 1,000 people—destroying houses, families, entire villages—Afghan TV cameras were there, sending images and information to viewers nationwide. 

• Also in June, Kelly Clements, the deputy high commissioner for the U.N. Refugee Agency, was in Afghanistan. I counted at least nine microphones pressing toward her. All but one or two belonged to Afghan news organizations.

• In July, Afghan media reported on a conference of religious scholars in eastern Afghanistan demanding education for all girls, as well as events such as a visit of Pakistani clerics to Afghanistan seeking Taliban help to find a peaceful end to an insurgency being waged by Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan’s border regions from bases in Afghanistan.

This is not journalism as it was before the Taliban took power last August, but it is journalism. It demands our respect and support. Sounding the death knell on journalism in Afghanistan is an insult to those tenacious Afghans who continue to report, edit, and broadcast under difficult conditions.

When they last ruled, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban banned television and photography, and there was only one government-controlled news agency doing any reporting. Then the country had just one computer, in southern Kandahar, and it was rarely, if ever, turned on. But this is not the Afghanistan of 1996. The internet is part of the fabric of the world now, and Afghans have become accustomed to having access to a significant number of television news channels, newspapers, and radio stations that did not exist before, as well as to social media networks—for all their flaws and falsehoods—that now flourish.

There is also resistance to the Taliban’s clampdowns on freedom now, whereas there was no such resistance when they last ruled. In May, when Taliban spokespeople said women had to cover their faces, even on television, male presenters at Afghanistan’s TOLONews all wore face masks for four days as a protest. 

The number of women working at TOLONews is growing. Following the Taliban takeover last August, much of the staff of TOLO TV, which offered entertainment as well as news, fled the country. But TOLONews director Khpalwak Sapai stayed—and made it his job to hire women when their qualifications matched those of male candidates for the same position. Before the Taliban returned to power, TOLONews had 79 staff positions, of which 11 were for women, and 8 of those were journalists, owner Saad Mohseni told me. Today TOLONews has 78 positions, of which 21 are for women, all as journalists. The staffing is fluid, said Mohseni, but TOLONews has continued to hire women in greater numbers.

This is not to say that journalism is without cost. Sapai and two of his colleagues were detained in March over a report that the Taliban had banned all broadcasts of foreign drama series. Other journalists have been picked up and beaten for simply doing their job.

Yet every morning in Afghanistan journalists step out their door unsure what the day will bring, and ready to face it. One afternoon it might be a new edict curtailing women’s freedom, another it’s a thuggish intelligence agency—not unlike many other intelligence agencies around the world—making an arbitrary arrest. On still other days, if the journalist is a woman, she faces harassment for simply being a woman.

Journalists working in many parts of our increasingly polarized and angry world navigate similarly treacherous landscapes. Nevertheless, each day they step out their door. They show up at work and report as they can. They reaffirm each day what it means to be a journalist in a country ruled by a repressive regime that defines journalism as adherence to one version of the truth. 

This is what Afghan journalists also do every day.

Looking back over the 20 years when the Taliban were out of power, the media industry grew at a remarkable pace. The proliferation of television news channels was rapid, and the number of young people who wanted to become journalists was inspiring. But the exodus of journalists that accompanied the collapse of Afghanistan’s Western-backed government begs questions about the training that was provided, as well as the extent and quality of support that was developed over those two decades.

The basic principle of journalism is independence, yet in post-2001 Afghanistan, the expansion of the news industry became, to a certain degree, an extension of the U.S.-led coalition’s mission. In this way, it was closely tied to both the new government and the international community that helped bring that government to power. 

Some journalists were deeply critical of their Western-backed leaders and bravely told of the corruption that crippled progress, yet they also came to believe, consciously or not, that their survival was inexorably linked to the government’s survival—that the job of journalism was possible under some governments and not others.

That view is mistaken. Afghan journalists are now needed more than ever, and they need help inside of Afghanistan. Some journalists have been threatened and they have feared for their lives, but the only answer can’t be evacuation. You cannot evacuate every woman, every journalist. Evacuation, after all, is not the go-to strategy in any of the many other countries where journalists are under threat. Afghanistan, like other countries, needs journalists to speak truth to power.

It was easy to promote and nurture journalists in Afghanistan when the government and international community wanted journalism to flourish. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the country toward that end. But now money is flowing out and help for journalists in Afghanistan is limited.

So what can be done? When the U.S.-led coalition was overseeing Afghanistan, journalists faced the threat of bombings and targeted killings—and not just by the Taliban. Reporters were outfitted with flak jackets, helmets, and given training in conflict reporting to help mitigate the dangers. Today the threats come from a repressive and rigid Taliban regime, and journalists need to be re-outfitted to mitigate the new dangers.

There are no quick fixes, which we in the West so often want, but we can begin to explore possibilities. Afghan journalists may be able to learn from others who work in similarly perilous situations, for instance. There are reporters the world over who know just how scary it is to work in repressive environments—and also know something about how best to navigate the dangers. They could be recruited and put in touch with journalists in Afghanistan. There would be language barriers, of course, but many talented translators are available, including in Afghanistan. And while circumstances are different the world over, the dangers journalists confront also have similarities. It would be wrong to underestimate the value of simple contact between journalists facing their own sets of troubles. 

That’s just one form of professional backing. A second approach could involve emotional support. A team of counselors could be made available to provide a friendly ear and a professional voice to offer a different type of guidance. And these professionals don’t need to be outside of the country. Too often we in the West forget we have no monopoly on knowledge and talent. Afghanistan has a vast reservoir of skilled, smart people—some never left their country, not even for studies. Universities in Afghanistan have a proud history and have graduated talented professionals, even during the worst of times. There are doctors, psychologists, and professors who could perhaps work with trauma experts elsewhere, and in turn offer counseling to Afghan journalists when they need it, if they need it. 

Lastly, journalism-advocacy groups should go into Afghanistan and establish offices there to better understand the landscape. They should talk to Taliban rulers—engage with them. No good will come from not talking to them.  

Even in the best of cases, journalism is not easy. But without it we are hostage to lies. Truth dies, and rulers who seek to distort reality and repress individual freedoms—whoever and wherever they might be—win.

Kathy Gannon covered Afghanistan and Pakistan as a correspondent and bureau chief for The Associated Press for over three decades, from 1988 until May 2022. She will be the Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School for the fall semester, 2022. The views expressed here are her own.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Kathy Gannon.

We speak with historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, whose new book “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands” tells the story of the often-overlooked men and women who incited the Mexican Revolution and how it relates to the rise of U.S. imperialism. The movement included intellectuals, workers and others who opposed Mexico’s dictatorial President Porfirio Díaz, who ruled for decades with support from the U.S. government and U.S. business elites. “What we have is Latinx protagonists at the center of the American story,” says Hernández, who teaches history, African American studies and urban planning at UCLA. “If you want to understand the rise of U.S. empire, you want to understand U.S. immigration history, you want to understand the issues of policing we are confronting today, we have to know that these are Latinx histories.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Two right-wing Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, crossed the aisle Wednesday to help Republicans approve a motion aimed at barring President Joe Biden from declaring a climate emergency, a step that green groups have been pressuring him to take since his first day in office.

The nonbinding motion, sponsored by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) and approved by a vote of 49-47, states that Biden "cannot use climate change as the basis to declare a national emergency." House and Senate lawmakers will consider the motion as part of their efforts to finalize legislation packed with subsidies to profitable microchip corporations.

"This is an outrageous betrayal... Shame on you."

It's unclear whether lawmakers will ultimately include the climate emergency language in the final bill, but environmentalists voiced outrage at the motion's passage as Manchin and Republicans continue to obstruct desperately needed congressional action to slash greenhouse gas emissions and bolster renewable energy production.

A separate motion instructing lawmakers to reject provisions that "prohibit development of an all-of-the-above energy portfolio"—which would include oil and gas production—also sailed through Wednesday by voice vote.

"Our political leadership is out to kill most of us," Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said in response to the vote. "Every branch of [the federal government] (executive, Congress, courts) is rotten to the core."

"Manchin shouldn't be voting on climate/energy issues, based on his glaring and obvious conflict of interest," Sen added, alluding to the West Virginia Democrat's stake in his family's coal empire. "If we had a civilized system of government, he would be investigated for corruption, not heading the Senate energy committee."

Kai Newkirk, a progressive activist based in Arizona, focused his ire on Kelly, who was a NASA astronaut before entering politics.

"An astronaut who's seen the planet from outer space voting to remove one of the only tools we have to confront the climate crisis that isn't blocked by the filibuster and Manchin's corruption?" Newkirk wrote on Twitter. "This is an outrageous betrayal, Sen. Kelly. Shame on you."

As the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted in a February report, a climate emergency declaration would empower Biden to take a number of steps to combat the planetary crisis without needing the approval of Congress, including immediately halting crude oil exports and boosting green energy manufacturing.

"Congress enacted emergency powers to allow the executive branch greater flexibility to respond to extraordinary events," the report states. "The climate emergency is the pinnacle of extraordinary events faced in our lifetimes. Biden should lawfully use emergency powers to address this existential threat."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.